Get a jumpstart on the day with a light continental breakfast – and find out what fellow attendees are looking forward to most from the day ahead.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact kevin@ere.net or danielle@ere.net.

Conference Chair Ron Thomas kicks off the inaugural TRANSFORM event and highlights what to expect from the conference.

How you attract, interview, hire, train, develop and treat your employees is commonly known as the one true strategy to provide great guest service & employer loyalty. A specific culture must be created & fostered to secure commitment from the employees to stick around and deliver the desired service. This takes time and a lot of work.

This interactive session is effectively designed to highlight best practices to create and maintain a strong internal employee culture and build an Army of Giants. Knowing that Millennials & Digital Natives are the talent pool, with which our industries are made, there are some key strategies that can be used to tap into and develop that workforce.

Because of its successes – publically and internally – the visceral backdrop of the Hard Rock brand will be used as a platform to discuss ways to create, maintain or revive a desired employee environment, regardless of its current state.

Topics covered will include:
• The Employee Life Cycle
• Hiring Tools & Best Practices
• Effective Training Materials
• Technology & Social Media
• Virtuous Cycle vs. Vicious Cycle
• The Emotional Bank Account
• Mentorship & Development
• Retention Strategies

Moving at blazing speed, Jim Knight’s session will be chock-a-block full of visual Power Point slides, out-of-the-box thinking, book quotes, personal stories, exercises, industry statistics and an interactive handout for some real “take aways”…all told through the spirit of Rock ‘n Roll.

If you’re a fan of irreverence & unpredictability, come see what all the noise is about.

Take advantage of this quick break to grab refreshments, mingle with attendees, and visit with our sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

Business competes for talent today in a free global marketplace in which traditional definitions of job and employee are increasingly outmoded. As a direct result, HR leaders must also change traditional ways of working in order to maintain their central role in the organization of the future.

While many influences are bringing about this change, perhaps the most important is the way in which the worker now approaches and engages with work. Workers today use the sensibilities of consumers to search for overall work experiences that not only provide a sense of connection and fulfillment, but also a part of their personal brands.

Libby’s presentation has an essential message for all HR leaders: You can guide your organization through this competitive marketplace by treating your worker pool more like consumers and less like employees. Think of each phase in the worker life cycle as a branded experience and design your HR programming to deliver this experience. Workers will become more engaged and your organization will be prepared for the impending brain drain likely to occur when the economy turns around and disengaged workers head for more meaningful work.

This talk will challenge audience members to:

• Establish a team at the top with Marketing, Communications and Business operations to create the right worker experience at each stage of the employment life cycle

• Consider the both needs of the business and sensibilities of workers to meet changing business requirements

• Become an organization that creates strong connections with its prospective talent pool and a reputation for providing a great worker experience.

Enjoy a buffet lunch in the exhibit hall – mingle with other attendees, chat with speakers, and check out the latest and greatest from the recruiting industry’s leading vendors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing talent should be the most important tasks in a corporation. So why is it that HR doesn’t always feel like they carry that much influence in the organization?This session will dig deep into the “Why” and discover the “How” in uncovering strategies you can use ot move your HR operation into a position of power within you organization.Your CEO wants a number of things out of HR, and none of them have to do with processes, policies, or more strategy meetings. So wear a helmet — this one might sting a little!

Good companies – those that are good to their employees, their customers, their communities, and the environment – make more money than their less worthy competitors. Yep – it’s true. Come hear economist Dr. Laurie Bassi: share the hard-nosed evidence that she and her co-authors unveil in their new book (Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era ); describe the convergence of forces that are behind these findings; share some fascinating stories, and; discuss what this means for HR and learning professionals. You’ll leave armed with powerful new evidence and a fresh perspective that you can use to get the resources you need to help your organization be “good company.”

Take advantage of this quick break to grab refreshments, mingle with attendees, and visit with our sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

Managers and employees alike dread the time of year when they have to meet and discuss where the employee fits into the little scoring boxes on the traditional performance appraisal form. Companies forget that imperfect humans are ranking the performance of other imperfect humans on a piece of paper. Is it really objective? There are better options to evaluate performance that will improve workplace relationships and make a positive impact on employee engagement. It’s time for companies and leaders to break this pattern in order to achieve a win-win work environment.

Great HR is simple. Just hire great people and treat them right and most of your problems will disappear. The problem is that this just isn’t easy. It’s simple, but not easy, to recruit the best and screen out the rest. And it’s not easy to have high hiring standards and stick to them (especially when you needed someone yesterday, so you hire the first warm body that walks in the door). It’s not easy to insist on a structured interview process that asks the same key questions of every applicant when it’s easier to wing it and rely on first impressions and gut instincts. It’s not easy to check references. (What are the chances of being faced with a negligent hiring lawsuit anyway?) It’s not easy to minimize costly employee turnover by making the first day on the job the best that new hire ever had. Might as well just throw them in and see if they sink or swim.

In this session, Mel Kleiman will share all of the best practice tools, tips, and techniques you need to implement a simple, first-class employee recruiting, selection, and retention system and how that will make HR both simple AND easy.

Take advantage of this quick break to grab refreshments, mingle with attendees, and visit with our sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

Attorney Eric Meyer deals with the legal impact of social media in the workplace every day. He will lead a panel of HR professionals who also deal with social media on the job, but who are also taking proactive steps to create thoughful policies and procedures that help their employees to navigate the ongoing changes that organizations are struggling to cope with today.

In this session you’ll not only learn about the latest legal issues pertaining to social media in the workplace, but also the most current HR strategies and procedures for dealing with this ever-changing and highly-charged issue.

Work, done well, should be rewarding to the employees who perform it, and the rewards of work should represent a smart and well-executed investment to the employers who provide them.  Making all this happen was never easy, of course, and today we find that circumstances are making this increasingly difficult even as the stakes keep going up.  In this session, we’ll call out and examine some of the key developments that are affecting work and how we reward it.  We’ll also discuss what these trends mean for how our compensation and related reward programs are designed, managed and communicated.

Wind down the day with drinks and appetizers in the exhibit hall — a great opportunity to see what fellow attendees learned that day. Don’t miss out on this chance to engage your colleagues in discussions about the challenges facing our industry.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact kevin@ere.net or danielle@ere.net.

Join us as we honor the winners of the Most Effective Leadership Practices competition. Learn from leaders and managers who create and implement innovative and motivating ways of managing every day. Brought to you by eePulse, the Center for Effective Leadership (CEO) at the University of Southern California, and TLNT.

The Conference Chair recaps yesterday’s sessions and highlights today’s discussions.

Considered one of the most progressive and talented executives in major league baseball today, Billy Beane has molded the Oakland Athletics into a perennial contender since becoming general manager following the 1997 season. His unique, forward-thinking approach to talent management has been chronicled in the the best-selling book (and now major motion picture) “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an
Unfair Game.” He will talk about his people management philosophy as the keynote speaker at TLNT Transform!

The workforce of the future is changing in its demographics, its attitudes and its want and needs almost as fast as technology is changing. For managers and HR professionals, this will mean a radical shift in the way we conduct business and manage talent 10 years from now. Organizations need to prepare today for the seismic shifts that are coming so that they will not be caught unaware and will remain a viable entity in the future. Management expert Margaret Morford will walk participants through what these shifts will be, some of which are in the infancy stages so they are not even on the radar screens of most organizations. She will offer practical suggestions for things employers need to be doing today in order to prepare as well as protect themselves from the legal liabilities that will arise from some of these trends and shifts. Participants need to start today to be ready for what the workplace will look like in 2014 and even 2020!

Take advantage of this quick break to grab refreshments, mingle with attendees, and visit with our sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

The cultivation of the individual talent in employees and leaders has defined the game in HR for the past decade. But the game is changing. The future of HR will no longer be defined by the individual. The future of HR is about what happens between individuals and how to create value through relationships. This value is called social capital.

Social capital is transforming both the how and the what of HR work. To lead the way in HR, we must harness the power of social capital to increase our influence within the organizations. We must then use this influence to help our organizations rethink how work gets done. Leaders and organizations that intentionally cultivate social capital will unleash more trust, innovation, speed and creativity. Talent Anarchy will reveal how social capital works and how to create it both personally and organizationally.

“Increasing employee engagement pays off for the employer.” No belief is stronger among HR professionals today. Some academic researchers and all major HR consulting firms offer studies claiming that employee engagement leads to higher productivity, lower turnover and absenteeism, more customer loyalty, and higher profits. Yet, companies increasingly are implementing expensive engagement initiatives and seeing no change in business results. It is time to step back and take stock of a very large body of evidence to ask what we know about engagement and how to make engagement pay off.

The presentation asks several basic questions about employee engagement and offers provocative answers. What is employee engagement, and do we really need an expensive new approach for measurement and monitoring it? When does employee engagement pay off, and when does it just result in happier employees who perform no better? How do employee motivation principles make engagement a far more powerful concept? Finally, how can we design talent managements systems of all kinds to foster employee engagement that leads to organizational performance? The session will examine lessons for recruiting and selection, training and development, performance management, compensation and benefits, and organization design.

Enjoy a buffet lunch in the exhibit hall – mingle with other attendees, chat with speakers, and check out the latest and greatest from the recruiting industry’s leading vendors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

With wellness, it’s not all about them — what your employees do or don’t do that affects their health. It’s about you — the leaders — too. Join this session to acknowledge barriers to workplace wellness. Then let’s get busy and discuss trends, innovations and successes. You’ll learn what employers, counties, startups and other public health organizations are doing that’s working. You’ll share where you’re stumbling and where you’re soaring. And you’ll leave with at least a few new ideas to include in your approach to workplace wellness.

What does it take to drive change and lead an organization to improve? Mike Gannon, Senior Vice President at Nexteer Automotive, will talk about what his company did to make change a positive and accepted part of the organization’s DNA. And, he’ll get into the specific, forward-thinking business practices that made Nexteer this year’s big winner in the Most Effective Leadership Practices Competition.

Take advantage of this quick break to grab refreshments, mingle with attendees, and visit with our sponsors and exhibitors.

For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Kevin Plantan (kevin@ere.net) or Danielle Moseley (danielle@ere.net).

It is critical for leaders to be aware of and to monitor the external and internal forces that bear on the people of their organizations. Anticipating the demographic, technological, and economic forces that shape the future of your organization is imperative. This session takes these three major forces predicts the general impact of each; and further generates possibilities for effectively addressing the challenges each will present.

Don’t look now, but the C-suite is shrinking. Or at least, it doesn’t seem as though a day goes by when there isn’t another article being tweeted about how HR chiefs are forfeiting their C-suite influence to the CFO. HR chiefs are not alone. IT and marketing chiefs are also reportedly making similar concessions to finance. However, the fact is the C-suite isn’t shrinking, it’s just that CFOs are now hardwiring the other chiefs’ decision-making. Or, to put it another way: finance is calling the shots. But what does this mean exactly for the HR function?  And what does this tell us about how CFOs regard HR and the people management operation? Now, Nick Araco, CEO of The CFO Alliance, a peer-to-peer community of more than 2,000 CFOs, explains why CFOs are asserting their influence more than ever with no apologies. Find out what HR professionals stand to gain from a finance-enriched leadership model, and what HR practices will need to change.  Learn how CFOs are also changing to better align themselves with HR priorities and jointly tackle transformational challenges such as healthcare.

At most organizations, benefits make up 30% of compensation spending.
Satisfaction with them is a major driver in employee loyalty. Successful programs create a healthier, more productive workforce. Yet, for too many organizations, benefits fall to the bottom of the list of strategic priorities.

Jennifer Benz, a leading benefits expert and frequent TLNT contributor, will share the simple—and attainable ways—benefits can become a driver of strategic HR and a success story within your organization. By focusing on effective benefits communication, you can improve the ROI on that 30% spend, while helping employees and their families make the changes in their lives that have real impact—on them and on your company.